I think I do understand what you are saying. I'm going to paraphrase what I believe is your central point, and respond to that.

If the movement appears significant between two frames, then the object will appear to jump from one position to another, where as with motion blur you will be able to detect the movement. If this is what you are saying it does shine some light onto what may be an appropriate time to use motion blur. However in any games I have played that use motion blur the blurring effect is used when there is not a significant change in the object between the frames, so instead of being able to focus on the object in it's current position the object is blurred in a way that is just distracting, for me anyway.

As someone who plays a lot of video games, I don't understand.

Firstly, if a game is displaying at less than 60 FPS it is going to play like garbage. I've heard people claim that 30 FPS is fine, but it is absolutely noticeable and makes my eyes water. I have stopped playing and given away games that do this on consoles and on PC I won't attempt to play a game in league unless I can get at least 60 fps stable 100% of the time.

Secondly, motion blur?! Humans have these things called eyes that use light to perceive the environment around them and automatically perform their own "motion blur". Why would anyone want to purposely lose detail in a frame by making it blurry? Especially during movement? It just looks watery and awful. I've played several games that have had this on by default and have tried it, but the games were pretty much unplayable with it on.

Two examples of terrible games due to their graphical defaults. Halo: Reach, I literally gave away because playing it felt like rubbing sand in my eyes. Im blaming this on low fps and low AA which caused a lot of flicker. Amnesia, I heard everyone rave about and due to its collection of graphical oddities including motion blur I literally can't play the game at defaults for more than a few minutes without getting ill. Playing with its graphical settings makes it somewhat better at the cost of the game looking awful and losing all atmosphere.

So there is no way to shutdown the computer without using the tablet interface (charms bar) or the command prompt.

If we had to use a shell to restart our Android device it certainly would make as much sense.

well its a good thing no data being read at bootup or during normal operation is subject to being written to because if it were it would be impossible to store inside of a presigned binary. </sarcasm>

The reality is the signed executables are going to interact with unsigned data during bootup or normal operation and the exploit to run unsigned code can be triggered at this point

For example the original xbox could be convinced to run unsigned code through exploited game saves and then system files(fonts/audio db) could be replaced with corrupted versions meant to trigger an exploit on bootup. This is how soft modding was performed for the xbox.

A joystick calculates the on screen movement from 2 things. The x/y movement of the stick from it's resting position (this is the vector) and the degree of angle of the stick from it's resting position (this is the amplitude). The vector and the angle are taken together to find the total relative movement which is then used to calculate the new absolute position on the game screen.

A mouse (in a FPS) simply records the relative x/y movement from it's previous position. Because there are no other factors than the x/y positions the absolute positions on the mouse pad will always map to an absolute position on the game screen. For instance a professional gamer may have "memorized" that a particular point on their mouse pad will equate to 180 degrees behind them at head level.

While this is in theory possible with the joystick if a console gamer were to memorize the x/y position and angle of the stick, it is not possible in reality. The stick itself is measuring previous amplitude movements on the way to the current amplitude movement and ( due to the small form factor of most joysticks and the reality of needing a usable sensitivity) taking into account how long the movement is held in.

Overall this means that mouse players can instantaneously move to any point on the screen without requiring visual feedback from the screen or having to consider any timing information. The same performance with a joystick is much more complicated and does require a certain amount of timing and probably recognition of visual clues from the screen. This is why PC FPS players will always have a much easier time aiming than console gamers.

The only real issue with the mouse/keyboard combo is that a gamer can't sit on the couch and play in a relaxed/social environment like you can with a console controller.

As you all know I have a rockin' tight ass, a successful project on Kickstarter that you've all funded, and a cyberstalker that goes by the name of FrankSinatraDirtyTalker1915@comcast.net.
I originally met "Frank" back in College, where we dated for a bit. I should point out that he's not an old man, as his username might imply, but rather someone who is simply obsessed with Frank Sinatra and my gorgeous rockin hard ass.
Anyway, when I broke up with him he took it pretty badly. It was our Sophomore year at Rice University and I had just discovered gravity bongs and going down on another girl while blazed out of my gord. As I've admitted, these were confusing albeit fun times for me.
Meanwhile, "Frank" was raised as a Mormon but had recently converted to Scientology. I guess you might say he was experimenting with his own hallucinogenic homoerotic drug. This drug/sex/cult cocktail, combined with my round pulchritudinous derriere, and the sudden shock of losing his ability to play his daily role of dressing up as Dr. Parnassus while gently fondling my perky nipples and supple breasts that he had affectionately named the Merry Mammary Sisters of Nippopolis, and Queens of the Breastiary - led to Frank's complete mental breakdown.
I don't blame Frank for my rockin body, just as I don't blame you for being attracted to my intelligence and funding my project on Kickstarter. However, what I do not like is being stalked. I hope you all do what I do when you see Frank's messages on any thread related to my project. Just lick your index finger, point it at Frank's username and then say, "Ooooooooooooo ICE COLD! Mama thinks you're a BAAAAD BOYYYY! OOOOOO Ice Cold..." then point the same finger back at your left nipple and make a sizzling sound "SSSSSssssssssssss" and sing this little rap
Thank you all again for funding my project on Kickstarter. You're clearly invested in a winner!

also relevant:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840589

Unless you use automatic login.

Then it defaults to Unity.

It is configurable, but not a good default. On my system where I use automatic login, the automatic removal of the nvidia drivers during the upgrade and the default behavior to use Unity caused a situation that required a TTY to resolve. That is not the behavior of a system I would promote in the way I've promoted Ubuntu in the past.

I also attempted to install Gnome 3 under the new Ubuntu and ran into a bunch of strange issues that prevented it from working in an acceptable fashion, so if you want a new desktop you are kind of stuck with Unity or dealing with that mess.
BR I switched over to Fedora 15 Beta a few days ago and have so far found it working much better than I would have expected. It's extremely robust for a beta, all my hardware works (even HDMI audio out which did not work on Ubuntu) and the multimedia experience is equivalent(admittedly with the addition of the rpm fusion repositories, but it's not like flash "just worked" on Ubuntu either).

I will probably check out Ubuntu again next release, but their UI decisions over the last two releases are not promising.

I'm the owner of a Samsung Epic 4G, which of course Samsung hasn't put out an update for.

The first thing I did after getting the phone was convert the file-system to ext4 (because samsung are Epic assholes) and load a custom Froyo ROM on it. Problem Solved.

There are enough android phones out there that if you want a MotoTouchSenseBlurWhiz TM based phone, you can certainly get it... or if you don't want that then you can go with a better manufacturer that sticks to a more vanilla version of android and sends out updates in a timely manner.

So why did I get a Samsung Epic 4G knowing full well before purchasing the device that I'd spend hours replacing Samsung's software? Because there simply wasn't another phone with those kinds of specs that gave me the features I wanted (a keyboard, 4G radio, and front facing camera). Which is really the best part of it all though. Modders can make ROMs at such a high quality (probably at least partially due to the open source nature of Android) that I didn't even care what software came loaded on my device. I bought the hardware for the hardware and had the freedom to load whatever software I wanted on it.

Does anyone else think the newer style graphics in ODST and Reach have actually gotten worse since the original?

The first Halo had a lot of luminosity and sort of a glossy sheen over structures in the environment giving the alien world a unique and strange feel, the world was bright in a building or outdoors keeping the mood lighter but also allowing you to see your enemies, and the back drops appeared to fit into the level giving epic views of the ring world you were fighting on.

Halo: Reach is dark almost everywhere making it very hard to recognize the difference between an enemy brute attempting to rip your face off or a random civilian you are supposed to be protecting. I attempted to resolve this by tuning my TVs picture mode to dynamic and upping the video brightness configuration in Halo: Reach to the highest setting, but lighting becomes uninteresting and also appears washed out while not making it much easier to identify targets. The sheen and lighting of the original Halo is not there at all, just as in ODST structures in the environment look cartoonified. Spartans and Elites are about the only things that retain some interesting lighting effects, everything else can catch a shadow, but doesn't seem to reflect light in anyway. The 2D backgrounds are non-immersive, obviously drawn, and separate from the 3d world.

Some of these lighting issues seemed forgivable in ODST as this was mainly an expansion pack and the real feature in ODST for me anyway was firefight which never seemed as dark. The use of VISR in ODST also helped to make up for the terrible lighting conditions, but at least so far I haven't seen anything like VISR in Halo: Reach. There is a night vision ability, but this just adds to the general brightness, effectively washing out everything in green.

Aside from all this at least on my xbox 360, the engine stutters(although infrequently), textures can be seen loading in even during some cut scenes(again infrequently), and there seems to be a total lack of AA which creates so much flicker at edges that after a few hours of play my eyes were left almost bleeding. Fortunately my 360 decided to commit suicide about 6 hours into gameplay saving my eyes from melting out of my skull.

I'm sure with smaller better lit levels in multiplayer or firefight the issues aren't so egregious, and the better luminosity on Spartans and Elites must make it easier to track enemies in multiplayer. For the campaign though, one word sums up my experience: unplayable.

Typing "I can" results in a pretty offensive word for the top result on my machine.

The Dolphin browser does what you are asking for and has a lot of other nice features the default browser doesn't have.

Actually I'm pretty sure you can setup a samba domain in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with no console interaction either. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.